Peter Chianca: College visit provides an education in aging

Nothing disabuses you of the notion that you’re still young and hip like seeing actual college students, which I did last week. And I’m sorry to report that, much to my surprise, they are all 12.

Peter Chianca

For the longest time after I graduated from school, I thought that if pressed, I could still successfully pass for a college student. Until fairly recently I was sure if I visited a college campus, people would be coming up to me and asking if I had any classes in Miner Hall, or if I wanted to go to a mixer with them. I think that’s what they call those all-night parties with all the Ecstasy, “mixers.”

Of course, nothing disabuses you of the notion that you’re still young and hip like seeing actual college students, which I did last week. And I’m sorry to report that, much to my surprise, they are all 12.

I realized this during a family trip to my wife’s alma mater, Penn State University. This is a fine college whose mascot is the “Nittany Lion,” which is of course not a real animal, but nobody can bring themselves to tell the football coach, Joe Paterno. Every so often some trustee suggests it, and he or she is immediately bound, gagged and shipped off to Rutgers, never to be heard from again.

Anyway, the first thing I noticed when we hit campus was how incredibly young all the students looked. Not many of them seemed to notice us, because as adults who were not their parents, we were unlikely to be a source of spending money. But some seemed to think we were cute in our sensible shoes with our small children, walking around their campus as if we were somehow relevant. It’s that same look people give senior citizens playing bingo in a nursing home.

Of course, some things about college students never change — for instance, the fact that the minute the temperature climbs above 50 degrees, they all start dressing like they’re contestants on “Survivor: Borneo.” Also, they don’t really walk so much as amble, and that’s only when they’re in a hurry. Otherwise they’re lying in the grass on the quad, staring at the clouds and not thinking about how all this is getting paid for.

But there are other things that have changed quite a bit since I was in school. For instance, now students spend their entire day talking on cell phones. Groups of students walk together, each talking on his or her cell phone, presumably to other groups walking together while talking on their cell phones. I’m sure students often wind up talking on their cell phones to the person who’s walking right next to them, just by coincidence.

Meanwhile, as my wife pointed out, when we were in college, friends didn’t even know each other’s phone numbers. We just spent a lot of time banging on dorm room doors and yelling up at windows until people got mad and started throwing Ramen noodles at us.

I’ll venture to speak for my 40-ish brethren when I say it’s a little depressing to see how little we now have in common with college students: Besides looking so much younger than us, they all exude that unruffled attitude that only college students have, the one that says, “We have no idea that it’s all downhill from here.”

But it occurred to me that realizing we ain’t that young anymore (to quote Springsteen, whom the college students have probably never heard of, because he’s not in the Arctic Monkeys) in many ways is a good thing: For one, it keeps us from showing up for work in cargo shorts and no shirt, where the glare of the fluorescent lights off our pasty skin might cause our co-workers to go blind.

No, I guess I’ll just have to accept that my college days are long gone, and enjoy the occasional family visit to a campus where I can point out to my kids all they have to look forward to. Because let’s face it — it won’t be long before I’m visiting them at college.

I’ll be the one lying in the grass, not thinking about how it’s all getting paid for.

Peter Chianca is a CNC managing editor and the brains behind “The At Large Blog” (chianca-at-large.blogspot.com) and “The Shorelines Blog” (blogs.townonline.com/shorelines). To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

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